The conservative National Review appears “embroiled in a family feud,” said Timothy Noah in Slate. Columnist Christopher Buckley, the son of the magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, offered to quit to stem the flood of angry emails over his endorsement of Barack Obama. Editor Rich Lowry, Buckley said, “accepted—rather briskly!” Buckley says in The Daily Beast he’s been “effectively fatwahed” by the conservative movement; Lowry says in National Review that Buckley is exaggerating.
The problem for Lowry and the National Review, said Joe Gandelman in The Moderate Voice, is that Buckley is only one of “several conservatives making high-profile breaks with the McCain camp.” By ousting Buckley, they’re feeding a narrative which says, “accurately or inaccurately,” that “modern conservatism fired its founding family.”
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